Shellshatter needs to go or be applied to every shell that was affected in reality

Game Discussion General Discussion
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A few points regarding this mechanic, its implementation, lack of realism and effect on the fun in game:

  1. Giving such a mechanic a percentage-based chance of occurring is just a different way of spelling “RNG” (And yes, it is percentage based on top of every requirement, a shot that shattered once might not shatter the second time around despite everything being 100% the same)

  2. It is not applied for reasons of realism but at random. Historically speaking the most common round to “shatter”(read as fail) upon contact with armour was APHE and its derivatives. This cannot just be chalked up to bad metallurgy as it remains a factor even to this day. But bad metallurgy can exasperate the issue, as can specifically shell design. the Russian 47mm APHE comes to mind, a round so badly designed and of so poor metal quality that it was taken out of service during an acute ammo shortage, because it was literally a waste of time to even shoot it.

So APHE should definitely be affected by this mechanic, and it should be affected the most out of any shell type. The same also goes for solid AP btw.

  1. Shattering does not depend on specific shell, but purely on the general type. There is no differentiation between different APDS, APCR and other shells with this mechanic applied to them. So, a metal core APDS shatters the same as a high purity tungsten core APDS with a special tip design to reduce failure. The same goes again for all other shells with this mechanic.

So why is it even here? It is not at all realistic (in how it functions, in how it is implemented onto the shells, in its reach and more), it is not well balanced. With the current implementation of this mechanic the game is less realistic than it was before the mechanic was added.

So, I have 2 proposals.

1 Option) just remove the mechanic.

I know there are some who are against removing anything from the game no matter what, so go to option 2 then.
For all the remaining people who actually care about having a good game I see this as the best option. It is easy to do, removes one of the most frustrating aspects of playing multiple vehicles and does not change much in the form of gameplay for a majority of players.
The downside of this would be that some vehicles might see an increase in their performance, after all this mechanic was almost certainly introduced solely to nerf a certain class of vehicle, no matter how much people cry “But it’s for realism” (if that were the case 2) and 3) would not exist in my listing at all). But let’s just take a look at these vehicles, or rather the class of “light, fast autocannon armed vehicles”:
Since this change was implemented, we have seen major nerfs to this specific class.

  1. massive nerfs to traction and mobility in general
  2. Overpressure in combination with the addition of solely HE based classes
  3. massive buffs to APHE, both due to overpressure being added as well as a general reduction in fuse times from 0.5s to now usually 0.2-0.2s
  4. general increase in player skill in regard to them now knowing that 50cals and similar are useable weapons!
  5. massive nerfs to APC, HVAP and APCR penetration calculation. We saw a nearly 60% reduction of penetration(impact angles as stated on the stat card) above 50° and between 20% and 30% reduction in pen at 20°-30° angles, with buffs at the 0° angles being the only positive in that change, an angle with no chance to even have shell shatter occur. So, the removal of shell shatter would not buff the penetration, it would just remove an RNG based mechanic from it. so instead of 8 shots penning and 2 shattering now 10 would pen.

The biggest benefactors from this would be tanks with non-auto cannons. While the above nerfs apply to them as well they do not have the benefit of shooting 10 shells in 2s and therefore not caring about the two shatters out of 10. For them a single bad roll on a penning shot can end the match.

So, I do not expect the removal of shellshatter to massively buff autocannons at all. It will however make the game more predictable and reward game knowledge instead of putting it up to the RNG gods or having the player not take risky shots just because he has a shell loaded that can shatter.

2 Option)
This one will require a lot of work and will likely affect every single person playing ground RB.

  1. Give shellshatter to every type of shell that could experience it historically and today:
  • APHE, and variants
  • HE, and variants
  • AP, and variants
  • Non tungsten darts
  • HEAT (non-FS)

  1. Give each individual shell individual properties instead of all the same, even just “type” based would not be enough. These properties have to include the materials used (soft steel, hard steel, impure tungsten, etc.)

  2. make the mechanic exclusively dependant on how it hit, removing the RNG aspect. As every shell we fire in the game is supposedly the “best quality it could be in today’s world using old materials” there should be no reason to attempt to simulate material variation in the shells and armour.

Again, this will affect essentially everyone who plays ground, but it will also make this realistic (or as realistic as we can have in a game without making it an utter slog) instead of fully unrealistic as it is now.

I am fine with either of the two, though gameplay wise option 1 wins out because it makes the game less frustrating, meanwhile option 2 can make the game more rewarding (with the RNG removal) as good game knowledge gets rewarded.

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What you’re saying makes sense, but each bullet would have to be modeled differently. For example, APHE bullets would have a certain chance of fracturing depending on the quality of the bullet’s steel and the HE charge it carries. APC-HE bullets at 0° would resist impact much more, while at over 50° they would suffer slightly less chance of fracturing. Tungsten carbide APCR and APDS would fragment easily after piercing a certain amount of spaced armor, the chance being greater or lesser if they have a cap, and depending on the material of the cap. Tungsten alloy APDS would hold up quite well without fragmenting, their resistance being even greater depending on the material the cap is made of. With APDS-FS it would be the same; fragmentation would depend on the material of the arrow body, the point material, the cap material, etc. All of this has many variables, but with good work they could be given minimally realistic values, for example giving the AP bullets two or three levels of steel quality, and then varying with respect to whether they have a cap or have HE filling. In the APCR, APDS and APDS-FS if they are carbide, tungsten alloy, or depleted uranium, varying if they have a steel cap, tungsten carbide or alloy, or uranium.

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First of all, I think that shell shatter should be made less common, instead of outright removed. It is a realistic mechanic, and makes gameplay more varied and dynamic. It effectively balances a class of shells with high penetration.

Secondly, I highly disagree with the addition of shell shatter to “every shell that was affected in reality”. You bring up historical manufacturing defects, which is irrelevant; War Thunder only considers theoretical failure in most areas. That is, there are no manufacturing defects, only ideal failures. In this respect, shell shatter is overwhelmingly realistic for APDS, APCR, etc, but not so for APHE generally. Physics still applies.

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I did not want to increase the wall of text even more, hence why I formulated it rather short, but yes, this is, idea wise, what I meant when I said “Indivdual shell properties”.

This is also why I explicitly said that it would require a lot of work. But anything less than at least a rough material differentiation and compartmentation of shells would not achive the intended result of “Making it predictable and realistic”

I already explained why this is not the case. It is neither realistic, nor is it balancing a shell “with high penetration” All affected shells have among the lowest penetration in the game except for at 0°, which is essentially never encountered in gameplay. A 500mm penetration shell at 0° with 200mm pen at 30° is still worse than a 260mm pen shell at 0° with 220mm pen at 30° in most scenarios. At the BR APDS sits at it is normal to shoot targets with armour of 40° or more of angle on them even under otherwise ideal circumstances.

You should properly read what I wrote:

So you draw utterly wrong conclusions from my statements. Again, my statements are based on WT using “best possible” stats for shell types. Therefore manufacturing defects and so on are specifically excluded from my entire argumentation.

That is outright wrong. Physically speaking APHE is more suceptible to shattering than any solid core round. If you shoot two identical steel balls against a steel plate with one being hollow and filled with a softer material and one being solid the hollow one is more likely to shatter. There is a reason why for anti tank work solid rounds have replaced filled rounds in most cases by the end of 1941. Russia switched from its APHE round on the 47mm to APCR and in rare cases solid AP, while germany mainly used APCR. The only exception to that rule are breakthrough vehicles like the IS series, Tigers and similar. Those used APHE as it was great to defeat concrete bunkers. Ofcourse these shells had great effect against armour as well, but still a solid AP round would have performed better as can be seen by the US 120mm AP. To come back to the Tiger tanks, for anti tank work they got issued APCR, further showing thatz APHE was no longer considered an anti tank round by designers and general staff.

Even in the games idealistic world APHE should shatter more often than even early APDS shells. This is confirmed by post war testing of the types by various nations, most famously the UK. I mean it is no coincidence that every nation post war discontinued development of anti tank guns based around that type. The soviets developed APDS for their 100mm guns to replace APCR. APHE is only present in game because the gun was a WW II model with APHE already existing. The British L7 105mm gun never had a dual shell like APHE developed as it was intened as an anti tank gun, the same goes for the US M3 120mm cannon.

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This is not completely accurate. It must be taken into account that the cavity in the ammunition affected its structural integrity, but it did not really affect many of the bullet models, since the amount of explosive inside was quite small, leaving the front part of the bullet with enough integrity to not break so easily, added to the fact that many had a cap to protect them from impacts from 0 to 40º.
In this image you can see the 8.8cm PZGr 39 and Panzergranate APCBC, where you can clearly see that the Panzergranate has a larger cavity than the PzGr 39 which makes it penetrate more mm of armor, since having greater integrity it had a larger penetration limit, but that did not mean that the Panzergranate would break in any impact, it would have to hit an armor of considerable thickness for that to happen.

Other ammunition that suffered significantly would be the Italian WWII bullets, as they were heavily loaded with explosives, which, combined with their lower-quality steel, resulted in low penetration.
To a certain extent, with APHE and APC-HE, the issue of breakage is modeled by their penetration, as the in-game calculator penalizes their penetration depending on the explosive charge relative to their total weight.
Regarding the ammunition used in WWII, it could be said that 90% of them were APCBC-HE, as the Soviets, Germans, Italians, Japanese, and Americans used either APCBC-HE or APHE, with only the French and British focusing on Full AP. APCRs were severely limited by the expensive and scarce nature of tungsten at the time.Apart from that, the first APCR and APDS had quite a bit of penetration at 0º but lost a lot at 60º.
The issue of steel APs could be summarized as follows: everyone primarily used APHEs. The British switched to Full APs since there wasn’t much difference in damage, but they did gain penetration and, above all, avoided the premature explosion of HE bullets, which is very common with American bullets. Before the end of the war, the Americans realized that the M77 Full AP bullets worked moderately well against the Panthers, so they developed a slightly better version, the T33. This was an APBC that, upon impacting inclined armor, broke its tip, achieving greater penetration at 60º and being able to pierce a Panther at 900 meters. Once WW2 was over, the British focused on the APDS, while the Americans focused on the APBC of increasingly better quality steel such as the M318, which is a T33 with better heat treatment, the APBC of the M41 or the M103, and soon after began to develop their APCR for the 90 and 76MM cannon. While the Soviets remained trapped in the flat-nose APBC-HE, until the mid-50s, where they developed the APCBC-HE for the 100mm cannon.
On the subject of bullet shatter, the initial APCR and APDS could actually break earlier, since tungsten carbide is hard but brittle, so when hitting multi-layered armor the bullet would break, losing a lot of penetration, apart from the fact that it lost so much penetration at 60º. What I do see as really bad is the fact that the APCR and APDS break with anything. For example, if a Conqueror APDS stops in front of an IS-3 simply because it hit one of the tracks in front of it, the APCR and APDS should have to penetrate a certain amount of armor and then have a space for it to break, since it already has enough penalty with the loss of penetration at 60º, which would be the fact that the bullet breaks at those degrees.
Regarding the M103 APBC bullet, there isn’t much to say, except that it should be able to penetrate at a slightly higher angle than 60° because the tip breaks upon impact, which makes it more effective against inclined armor.

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Mg151 still waiting for real shatter

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This honestly makes a ton of sense especially considering all the BS nerfs or buffs Gaijin’s pulled as of late; mobility/traction as you mentioned and also APHE overperforming with a circular explosion rather than a cone shape due to the velocity

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the cone thing is a good thing that shouldnt be added as it makes game worse and less consistant adding more RNG which is dumb

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Shell shatter needs to be changed in its current form, regardless of if it applied to most rounds or not. Just because a shell “shatters” doesn’t mean that its mass just disappeared, but that’s how the game treats it. It would be more realistic, and less annoying, if shell shatter was just a nerf to penetration performance instead of an automatic non-penetration. How big the nerf is could depend on the shell caliber, type, impact angle, etc. APHE having a higher chance of suffering this penetration penalty would help make solid shot more attractive, but KE damage would need to be improved across most shell types so that this change isn’t rolled out as a pure nerf.

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I think the Shell Shattering Mechanic is fine, half the complaints about ammo on ground vehicles basically boils down to:

“This shell is clearly broken and inaccurately modelled because it doesn’t behave like an APCBC Shell with a HE filler”

In the protection analysis it would be helpful if you could model the shell shatter as an overlay, similar to when you have the overlay for penetration highlighted in Green. Except have the faces of the armour highlighted in black or a colour that can still be distinguished easily with another transparent colour layered over it. At least this way you can get an indication of which area’s will shatter your shell and learn new weak spots to target.

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more that it actually penetrating is a roll of a dice and if it will do any damage at all let along spall is another roll of the dice.

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A player new to ground battles would have a similar sentiment learning how angle armour affects both the relative thickness of the plate and the shells reduction in penetrating power at an angle.

From time to time I’ll check the post game hit analysis if someone starts complaining and or calling bullshit, low and behold they’ll be shooting heat shells at my Chieftain Mk.10 or shooting APCR at my Tiger II.

I don’t believe that my opinion here and previously commented explains the sentiment of everyone in the playerbase using APDS shells. The pattern that I see most frequently is people deriding the introduction of the mechanic and only after that do they make weak appeals to shell penetration, post pen performance, rng, and then “realism”.

I see it like every other feature of war thunder: its a tool to be learned, understood and then used within it’s reasonable limitations. You might as well be complaining about “Insert Plane” not being able to dogfight a Ki-43. This might seem like a gargantuan mental gymnastic but the fact is that war thunder player expect the developers to change the game to suit their desired style of play, rather than adaptimg to the game as it appears.

I’m by no means the greatest war thunder player but the successes I have had in this game have been from accepting the game as it is and playimg by it’s rules.

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I agree for the most part.
as a guy who 8 out of 10 most used tanks are all APDS/HVAP tanks I do have to say that the mechanic only affecting them when other shells were also very much susceptible to it feels like a malicious nerf considering how much realism is already sacrificed for the illusion that war thunder is realistic, especially when I get a ww2 tanks sabot shot shatter on a bmp1 and then eat its ATGM.